Tag: technology

Epic Gamma Fail

It’s always amusing to be lectured on feminist dogma by white-knighting gamma males desperate for female approval. A brief background:

  1. I wrote an Alpha Game post on the widely reported fact that most women who obtain computer science degrees don’t end up sticking with programming very long. I attributed this to the same reason women don’t write much hard science fiction; they are disinclined to put in the hard work required because they don’t enjoy it and it’s not a field where the usual trick of playing the “I’m just a little girl” card doesn’t get the men to do their work for them.
  2. A commenter added: “I think too many of these girls who get drafted in under the “MOAR
    GIRLS!” banner never see real work, then bail when they encounter it.
    Who will be at a technical conference debating the fine points of
    something technical, or the fine points of a pun, and who will be taking
    selfies in a mirror with a sign like “I am doing programming!”?
  3. Enter White Knight #1, who promptly took it to Twitter, encouraging male programmers to take pictures of themselves doing programming and posting them to Twitter with the hashtag #iamdoingprogramming.
  4. The gammas, sending the possibility of attracting some rare female attention, promptly committed the aforementioned epic gamma fail.
  5. One Ted Mielczarek ‏promptly declared the need for a Pink Programming Police. “We need some sort of HN-terrible-comment database that we can use as a “do not hire” blacklist.” He also threatened to never hire me. Oh, well, maybe I can find a job at Tor….

Apparently people with decades of experience in software development are simply supposed to ignore everything they have seen and heard while embracing the GIRLZ CAN 2 CODE movement. I have a better idea. Let’s take a scientific approach and simply mandate female employment on all mission-critical financial programming projects from now until the financial system collapses.

We know mass default and credit contraction is necessary to clear the system, so we may as well kill two birds with one stone.

Facebook fraud



How shocking that a thief like Zuckerberg would have built a massively fraudulent empire that rests on third worlders impersonating first worlders utilizing real products. If 1999 was tragedy, 2014 is pure financial farce.

The entire “social media” edifice is a giant variant on a Ponzi scheme. It’s Madoff economics.

Spying on Angry Birds

I don’t know about you, but I feel much safer to know that the NSA is keeping close tabs on middle-aged housewives playing Candy Crush:

The National Security Agency and its UK counterpart GCHQ have been developing capabilities to take advantage of “leaky” smartphone apps, such as the wildly popular Angry Birds game, that transmit users’ private information across the internet, according to top secret documents.

The data pouring onto communication networks from the new generation of iPhone and Android apps ranges from phone model and screen size to personal details such as age, gender and location. Some apps, the documents state, can share users’ most sensitive information such as sexual orientation – and one app recorded in the material even sends specific sexual preferences such as whether or not the user may be a swinger.

Many smartphone owners will be unaware of the full extent this information is being shared across the internet, and even the most sophisticated would be unlikely to realise that all of it is available for the spy agencies to collect.

Dozens of classified documents, provided to the Guardian by whistleblower Edward Snowden and reported in partnership with the New York Times and ProPublica, detail the NSA and GCHQ efforts to piggyback on this commercial data collection for their own purposes.

Scooping up information the apps are sending about their users allows the agencies to collect large quantities of mobile phone data from their existing mass surveillance tools – such as cable taps, or from international mobile networks – rather than solely from hacking into individual mobile handsets.

What a freaking joke. Every single employee in the NSA ought to be marched off to jail immediately. Pretty soon we’re going to learn that they’re spying on smart refrigerators too. How they rationalize this is Constitutional is beyond me. This is well beyond mere police state and deeply into farce.

30 years of Macintosh

Stephen Fry commemorates the 30th anniversary of the introduction of the Macintosh by lamenting one of the great mischances of history:

In one of the world’s most extraordinary missed meetings in industrial, commercial or any other kind of human history, a Henry Morton Stanley failed to encounter a Dr Livingston in the most dramatic and comical fashion.

In the early 90s a young British computer scientist, Tim Berners-Lee had been tasked by CERN (Centre Européeen pour la Recherche Nucléaire the now famous large hardon collider that found the Higgs Boson or a tiny thing pretending to be it) to go in and see if he could find a way of getting the Tower of Babel of different computing platforms used by the hundreds of physicists at the plant to talk to each other. He came up with something that made use of metatextual techniques that he called The Information Mine. Being a very very modest man he realised that those initials spelled out his name, TIM, so he changed it at the last minute to the World Wide Web. He wrote a language HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), a set of communication protocols (chiefly htttp — the hypertext transfer protocol) and an application, as we would now say, on which all these could run, which he called a browser.

He planned, devised, programmed and completed this most revolutionary code in Geneva on one of Steve Jobs’s black cube NeXT computers. Hugging his close to him he took the train to Paris where Jobs was going to be present at a NeXT developers’ conference. Clutching the optical disc that contained the most important computer code in history he sat at a desk while Steve marched up and down looking at hopeful programs and applications. As in all of Steve’s judgments they either sucked or were insanely great. Like a Duchess inspecting a flower show he continued along the rows sniffing and frowning until he got two away from the man who had created the code which would change everything, everything in our world. “Sorry Steve, we need to be out of here if we’re going to catch that plane,” whispered an aide into Jobs’s ear. So, with an an encouraging wave Steve left, two footsteps away from being the first man outside Cern to see the World Wide Web. The two men never met and now, since Steve’s death, never can.

Those who only know me as an inveterate Apple-hater probably don’t realize that I started out as an Apple guy. While my father built his fortune on the IBM PC, first on its need for memory cards, then on its need for high-resolution graphics, (he created and sold the first 1024×768 board for it, the ARTIST card.), my pride and joy and constant companion was an Apple //e. It was stacked, with two disk drives, a color monitor, and a 300 baud modem. I loved that machine, but I gave it up reluctantly when I went off to college and it became apparent that I was going to need something better suited to writing papers.

So, my parents gave me a Macintosh Plus, which gave me a huge advantage over other students, who had to wait their turn in the computer labs when they needed to write their papers. I had a particularly nice setup, since I lived in the only dorm with its own computer lab, complete with Macintosh computers and printers, so I could write my papers, then walk the disk down to the computer lab at 4 AM and print them out without delay. I remember, in particular, one paper on Alfred the Great that blew my professor away because it included a map of England on which I’d drawn the various extents of the Danelaw.

Not that he was unfamiliar with the Danelaw, but it was the first time he’d ever seen a printed graphic in a student paper. That was the power of the Macintosh. I don’t think I ever turned in a paper again without some visual example. In fact, looking at the two college papers I still have with me today, one on the economic development of Japan and the Soviet Union, the other on the Italian condottieri, I can see crosshatched maps of Italy and several charts very similar to those that regularly litter my economics posts. That Macintosh Plus created a habit of readily resorting to bar charts that apparently persists even today.

Where the Macintosh ultimately fell down was not in its failure to penetrate the business market. That’s the conventional wisdom, but it is wrong. Apple was never going to dislodge IBM and Microsoft there and was wise not to kill itself trying. The opportunity that Steve Jobs mysteriously missed, long before the World Wide Web, was the games market. Despite its GUI, the failure to adopt color for three years after the PS/2 introduced VGA/MCGA, as well as its reluctance to embrace a non-serious market, meant that Apple conceded the games market to DOS.

Papers be damned. The first time I saw Wing Commander, I switched immediately over to DOS and picked up a Compaq 386/25. I haven’t looked back since.

I admire the late Steve Jobs. He was an amazingly innovative corporate genius. It is deeply lamentable that his chief legacy as a technologist appears likely to be the walled garden of Apple.

A plague of fake reviews

It’s not just Amazon and the political trolls:

Sites
such as Amazon, TripAdvisor and Yelp are now the go-to destinations for
customers who want to cut through advertising waffle and discover what
products and services are really like. Yet, according to research that
is sure to panic business owners across the world, a fifth of Americans
have left online reviews for items they’ve never bought or even used. 
This figure is even higher (32 per cent) among parents with children
under 18 and the most popular reason why online shoppers questioned did
this was simply because ‘they felt like it.’

I think
“panic” is too strong a word. But I do think the online retailers need
to do a much better job of eliminating fake reviews and providing
meaningful rating systems than they do.

Although the
inaccurate headline is misleading. A fifth of all online reviews are not
fake. A fifth of Americans have, at some point, left a fake review.

Speaking Engagements

I occassionally receive requests for appearances from various organizations and conferences. While I appreciate the interest, I only accept speaking engagements in continental Europe and the United Kingdom. I do not accept speaking engagements in Asia or the Americas.

I should probably mention that I do not do book signings anywhere.

NSA backdoors the tech world

The NSA appears to have been bent on destroying the ability of American companies to export hardware as well as sell software services internationally:

They claim the performance of the company’s special computers is “unmatched” and their firewalls are the “best-in-class.” Despite these assurances, though, there is one attacker none of these products can fend off — the United States’ National Security Agency.

Specialists at the intelligence organization succeeded years ago in penetrating the company’s digital firewalls. A document viewed by SPIEGEL resembling a product catalog reveals that an NSA division called ANT has burrowed its way into nearly all the security architecture made by the major players in the industry — including American global market leader Cisco and its Chinese competitor Huawei, but also producers of mass-market goods, such as US computer-maker Dell.

These NSA agents, who specialize in secret back doors, are able to keep an eye on all levels of our digital lives — from computing centers to individual computers, and from laptops to mobile phones. For nearly every lock, ANT seems to have a key in its toolbox. And no matter what walls companies erect, the NSA’s specialists seem already to have gotten past them….

The ANT division doesn’t just manufacture surveillance hardware. It
also develops software for special tasks. The ANT developers have a
clear preference for planting their malicious code in so-called BIOS,
software located on a computer’s motherboard that is the first thing to
load when a computer is turned on. This has a number of valuable advantages: an infected PC or server
appears to be functioning normally, so the infection remains invisible
to virus protection and other security programs. And even if the hard
drive of an infected computer has been completely erased and a new
operating system is installed, the ANT malware can continue to function
and ensures that new spyware can once again be loaded onto what is
presumed to be a clean computer. The ANT developers call this
“Persistence” and believe this approach has provided them with the
possibility of permanent access.

Another program attacks the firmware in hard drives manufactured by
Western Digital, Seagate, Maxtor and Samsung, all of which, with the
exception of the latter, are American companies. Here, too, it appears
the US intelligence agency is compromising the technology and products
of American companies.

At this point, why would any European or Asian company buy products from an American company? The NSA is totally out of control and it has to be dismantled as soon as possible before the American tech sector is devastated.

And what are they doing with all this access? Stopping terrorists? Interdicting drug smugglers? Preventing bank fraud? No, they’re listening to American soldiers have phone sex with their wives back home.

The NSA has zero credibility at this point. Zero.

Federal interference: international edition

The unanticipated consequences of the NSA’s insane global spying are beginning to bite US corporations in the backside:

Some companies are apparently so concerned about the NSA snooping on their data that they’re requiring – in writing – that their technology suppliers store their data outside the U.S.

In Canada, a pharmaceutical company and government agency have now both added language to that effect to their contracts with suppliers, as did a grocery chain in the U.K., according to J.J. Thompson, chief executive officer of Rook Consulting, an Indianapolis, Indiana-based security-consulting firm. He declined to name the companies, which are using Rook to manage the segmentation and keep the data out of the U.S.

Thompson said the language began appearing in contracts over the past couple weeks, and could be an early indicator of things to come as businesses adapt to a landscape altered by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s leaks. Documents leaked by Snowden indicate that the NSA has tapped fiber-optic cables abroad, circumvented or cracked encryption and is massively collecting telephone records and Internet traffic. Facebook, Google, Apple and Yahoo were among 15 technology companies that asked President Barack Obama Dec. 17 to restrain the spy programs. Cisco said Nov. 13 that NSA spying has caused delays to networking equipment orders.

U.S.-based technology companies face a serious threat. The NSA disclosures may reduce U.S. technology sales overseas by as much as $180 billion, or 25 percent of information technology services, by 2016, according to Forrester Research Inc., a group in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

This isn’t a hypothetical threat. Already funds are indicating that they disdain US owners and startups are building their business models around the assumption that no one outside the USA will want to use software services beholden to the US government. The USA is in the ironic state of professing free trade in goods while laboring hard to ensure that no one wants to utilize its services.

The extent of the effects will take some time to become apparent, but the problem is that once they become clear, there will be no returning from them. I suspect the revelation of the NSA spying, and not the Iraq or Afghanistan invations will one day be seen as the Peak Empire point for the USA.

Fix insufficient permissions in Windows 7

It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything about Linux. This is mostly because I haven’t been using it. Due to some development projects over the past few years, I’ve been stuck using Windows, so I’ve been using XP and resolutely ignoring every new operating system introduced by Microsoft in the meantime. Everything works fine, although I have not been able to update Skype since not long after Microsoft bought them.

This has actually been a material benefit to me, not an irritation. It works fine, and in addition to reasons that shall presently be made clear, I still enjoy all the old functionality of certain third-party programs that Microsoft has intentionally broken with its helpful newer releases. The lesson, as always: never, ever, trust Microsoft to do the sensible thing.

Apple pens in its users, domesticates them, and milks them, but at least it treats them nicely and makes them feel good about themselves. Microsoft is like a big, fat ex-boyfriend who shows up at his former girlfriend’s apartment drunk and unannounced, insists on having sex, then throws up in her bed after passing out. It’s more than just the regret one feels after being forced to deal with Windows, it’s the time one has to spend to clean everything up afterwards.

Now, Spacebunny runs Windows 7, and in the course of daily events she made the rookie mistake of allowing Skype to update itself. Naturally, the update immediately caused Skype to stop working on her machine. She tried a few things and then turned the matter over to me because I so enjoy trying to work around Microsoft’s idea of making the interface easier. The problem is a fairly common one and is described here by one of the many people who have run into this problem:

“Every time I try to download the newest version of Flash Player, I get
an error message stating that I have insufficient user permissions.  I
am using Windows 7, it’s my home computer, I am the administrator (I
know because I checked) and no one else uses my computer.  I’ve done
everything I can (including creating a new Admin account – still didn’t
work).”

None of the suggested fixes worked. So, I went through all the various suggestions I could find online, including those on the Microsoft Forum. Most of them were entirely worthless. Seriously, I want to punch the fat, self-satisfied power users who that telling people how to click through the relevant dialogue boxes is a legitimate answer. But the problem obviously isn’t people not knowing how to use the operating system, since many of the messages clearly indicate we’re dealing with people who know what administrator status is, the problem is that clicking through the obvious dialogue boxes doesn’t freaking work!

I did all the obvious things. I even downloaded a special program to unlock the folder, which unlocked the folder but still didn’t grant whatever privileges were deemed necessary to simply delete the damned file. Logging in as an administrator didn’t work, creating a new administrator didn’t work, running the installer as an administrator didn’t work, unlocking the folder didn’t work, absolutely nothing worked. Even Markku couldn’t figure out how to fix the problem within a Microsoft paradigm short of reinstalling Windows. That being said, he did come up with the ultimate answer from the start, which is often apt when one is dealing with a Microsoft product: the first step is to tell Microsoft to fuck off.

Let me explain. The core problem is that the newer Microsoft operating systems do something incredibly stupid. In order to navigate all the complex crap that now surrounds diverse aspects of the increasingly crufty operating system, many installation programs now create a virtual administrator that has control over the various files and directories being used during the installation process. This virtual administrator does not exist, and by virtue of not existing, is not synonymous with any of the actual human administrators who actually use the computer.

Perhaps you already see the intrinsic problem there. If something goes wrong during the installation or update process, the real administrators do not have access to the files that were under the control of this nonexistent administrator. The real admin can see what’s there, but he can’t do anything about it. He doesn’t have access and he can’t give himself access. And if that protected file or folder is one that is required by an application installer that has somehow gone haywire, the user is screwed and will not be able to reinstall or use that application without either restoring a previous OS state or completely reinstalling Windows.

Nice work, Microsoft. Very helpful. It’s just a brilliant system. Honestly, it’s enough to make me want to go back to DOS and stay there. Sure, point-and-click is nice, but it’s just not worth putting up with this sort of insane and totally unnecessary crap. The First Rule of Operating Systems should be this: stay the fuck out of the advanced user’s way!

Fortunately, as Markku pointed out, Linux doesn’t give a damn about all of Microsoft’s increasingly lunatic complexities. And thanks to the Ubuntu Live option, it is possible to boot the machine into Linux off a USB stick, then delete the directory reserved to the nonexistent administrator without otherwise affecting the machine or the operating system. The entire process was very easy:

  1. Download an Ubuntu desktop ISO onto your hard drive. 13.10 is current.
  2. Download Pen Drive Linux USB Installer
  3. Insert USB stick with at least 2GB free
  4. Run Pen Drive
  5. Select the downloaded Ubuntu ISO. Click start.
  6. Wait 6 mins for Pen Drive to set up the bootable Ubuntu on your USB stick
  7. Turn off computer
  8. Boot into Linux (may be necessary to hit F12 to choose boot option)
  9. Find your Windows hard drive
  10. Find the problematic file or folder and delete it
  11. Remove USB stick
  12. Reboot into Windows
  13. Run application installer again
  14. Run the application.
  15. Bask in the momentary techno joy.

The whole process took about 15 minutes, most of which involved downloading the Ubuntu ISO and installing it on the USB stick. I’m posting this here because I haven’t seen this solution anywhere on the Internet, and despite involving a second operating system, it is the cleanest, fastest, and most effective way I’ve seen to completely resolve an extraordinarily annoying situation.

Of course, you won’t find this solution on any Microsoft forum. Why not? It appears that they would rather force their users to reinstall their operating system than let them know about a fast and easy fix for a common problem they created.

Mailvox: Talk Scalzi

Rocean appears to have forgotten that I am far from the only critic of McRapey:

Scazli has a new response to VD up. In essence, he’s smart, he’s honest, and gosh-darn it people like him. Or more accurately, just more adolescent snark and word games.

I checked it out and I don’t believe the post to be a response to anything I wrote. I suspect his cryptic meandering may have been intended as a response to Heartiste, given the references to a “stupidsphere”. I don’t question for a moment that an effete young lad, abandoned by his father and desperately seeking both attention and approval from the women upon whom his path to a better life depends, would genuinely subscribe to the equalitarian claptrap he has espoused in public for years. That doing so would tend to put him in good odor with the gatekeepers and shambling shoggoths of Pink SF/F is mostly a matter of positive happenstance.

UPDATE: Or perhaps he is addressing Ed Trimnell, who recently wrote:

John Scalzi is a pure, coldly calculating opportunist who knows exactly what he’s doing when he writes blogs posts like “Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is”. I suspect that Scalzi believes only a fraction of what he writes. 

Regardless, I found this admission from December 19th to be of more interest:

[T]his year, by blog readership looks like it end up lower than it was last year — about 7.5 million recorded visits for the year, as opposed to 8.1 million in 2012. I attribute this to a couple of month-long “semi-hiatuses,” during which I posted less while I was writing books or on tour, a theory borne out by looking at the monthly numbers (November, which was one of those months, had the lowest visitorship of any month in two years). However, this year I also added 15,000 Twitter followers, most of whom (so far as I can tell) are actual real live people and not Twitter bots, and my Facebook and Google Plus public pages also saw growth. (I should note 7.5 million visits still means 2013 is Whatever’s second best year ever, so I’m not exactly panicking over here in that regard. But again, the fact that my other online presences showed substantial growth works as an offset in any event.) 

Those of you who previously doubted me concerning my observations about Whatever’s declining traffic may recall the following statement, which I made here on December 10th. 

McRapey is unlikely to even hit 7.5 million Google pageviews this year; imagine how much more his readership would have declined if “those two sites” hadn’t mentioned him 145 times, to say nothing of the copious references on Heartiste and other sites.

As before, Scalzi is using “recorded visits” when a more accurate term would be “WordPress pageviews”. Translating the numbers into Google pageviews, he had 7.897 million pageviews in 2012 and he’s anticipating about 7.155 million in 2013. You knew he’d have an excuse for the decline and I was pretty sure “other online presences” would be one of them. But it’s not merely an excuse, it is a legitimate reason as well. Keep in mind that I’ve never once claimed that Mr. Scalzi is not influential in SF/F circles; he was able to arrange my expulsion from SFWA by threatening to quit, after all. My contentions have been limited to pointing out that McRapey is nowhere nearly as “huge” as he would have his fans believe, that Whatever averages less than one-twelfth of the claimed 50,000 DAILY READERS, and that his blog is in fact is considerably less popular than most of us thought until the end of last year.

Those who have mastered division will surely note that 7.155 million divided by 365 is 19,603, which would be considerably short of 50,000 even if Whatever had a 1/1 pageview/reader ratio. Which it obviously doesn’t.

That being said, I’m not surprised that Scalzi has done well on Twitter. Whatever will likely continue to decline in large part because Twitter is a medium much better suited to an approval-seeking narcissist with snarky little thoughts who is more interest in talking than listening, and whose primary interest in dialogue is receiving praise.

Technologies change. And one no longer requires a blog to post pictures of cats and repeatedly be told how awesome one is.

UPDATE: Sometimes, Johnny just can’t wait for the next back-pat and has to do it himself.  “I’m pretty smart”, he declares. Sure, not National Merit smart. Or even Mensa smart. But pretty smart. So he’s got that going for him, which is nice. Cocoa?